In conclusion I will have to say it is not God that fails at Love it is mortals.

+1.

God can't fail at love, because he doesn't exist.

That is your opinion and you can not prove it. Life offers too many gifts to say God fails at love. We have an awesome planet, everything we need to survive and all I believe our creator has ever wanted was for us to realize that our actions affect more than just you so use your gift of freewill to chose to be kind to others. Don't be selfish! All the pain and suffering is self inflicted. All of it.

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when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change

In conclusion I will have to say it is not God that fails at Love it is mortals.

+1.

God can't fail at love, because he doesn't exist.

That is your opinion and you can not prove it. Life offers too many gifts to say God fails at love. We have an awesome planet, everything we need to survive and all I believe our creator has ever wanted was for us to realize that our actions affect more than just you so use your gift of freewill to chose to be kind to others. Don't be selfish! All the pain and suffering is self inflicted. All of it.

Well, I don't know what love is apparently. earth has wonders this is true, but with no alternative it seems like even kids suffering malnutrition in sub saharan africa fine ways to think their days are fun. but their frame of reference is one of watching their friends die of starvation and any day they don't see one of their friends die is considered a pretty fun day. Take a kid from America or europe and have them miss 2 meals and their life is a horror show. Our frame of reference on earth only has our experience to evaluate. The people kicked out of eden may have found earth to be a horror show when compared with Eden.

I absolutely love my children. But I don't set them up to fail by introducing virtually insumountable obstacles, and when my children fail I still love them. For me to stop loving my children would take a far greater crime than one of failure to believe in something I said. If my child failed to honor and respect me I would not torture them FOR ETERNITY

Truth be known I would not torture Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin... for eternity and I certainly don't even love them. That is just human decency/empathy.

JB, Could you clarify what you mean by this? By self-inflicted I assume you mean the actual person being affected, not a general "self" as in all humanity. For example, if a child is raped/killed/starved/gets leukemia... I do not see that pain and suffering as self inflicted.

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If xian hell really exists, the stench of the burning billions of us should be a constant, putrid reminder to the handful of heavenward xians how loving your god is. - neopagan

That is your opinion and you can not prove it. Life offers too many gifts to say God fails at love. We have an awesome planet, everything we need to survive and all I believe our creator has ever wanted was for us to realize that our actions affect more than just you so use your gift of freewill to chose to be kind to others. Don't be selfish! All the pain and suffering is self inflicted. All of it.

If we leave God out of the above, it reads:

Life offers so many gifts. We have an awesome planet, everything we need to survive and we should realize that our actions affect more than just you so use your life to chose to be kind to others. Don't be selfish! All the pain and suffering is self inflicted. All of it.

You see, that makes just as much sense: there is no reason to drag in a non-existent god, is there? And you said it without having to call on the authority of "God". I am much more likely to believe things you say than things you say that God says.

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Nobody says “There are many things that we thought were natural processes, but now know that a god did them.”

Allah (or "God", for those who don't know The Truth), being an imaginary being, gets a fail in every category; not just love. If it's imaginary, it can't participate in any category. However, if we were to allow what people think of an imaginary being as evidence of its qualities, then Allah still gets a fail in the love category.

With my children I will allow them to fail but I usually warn them of the pitfalls, discuss the pro's and cons with them personally and when asked a question I tell them the truth as I see it. In other words I am not an invisible super dad hiding from sight and hoping my kids don't fail the tests I set before them.

Well, I don't know what love is apparently. earth has wonders this is true, but with no alternative it seems like even kids suffering malnutrition in sub saharan africa fine ways to think their days are fun. but their frame of reference is one of watching their friends die of starvation and any day they don't see one of their friends die is considered a pretty fun day. Take a kid from America or europe and have them miss 2 meals and their life is a horror show. Our frame of reference on earth only has our experience to evaluate. The people kicked out of eden may have found earth to be a horror show when compared with Eden.

I absolutely love my children. But I don't set them up to fail by introducing virtually insumountable obstacles, and when my children fail I still love them. For me to stop loving my children would take a far greater crime than one of failure to believe in something I said. If my child failed to honor and respect me I would not torture them FOR ETERNITY

Truth be known I would not torture Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin... for eternity and I certainly don't even love them. That is just human decency/empathy.

I am very sure you know what love is epidemic. The bible isn't God's words, it belongs to mankind not God. There are clues all around of God's love and intelligence. We have the gift of conscience to know right from wrong, that is how we know religion is bad.

I look at it like this. The Christians came along and interpreted God in a way that made all other interpretations less appealing. That's how you improve their interpretation. That's how you change the world. You change the current interpretation of our Creator/ Force/Source. In other words we need 1 God and no religion. 1 God that loves with gifts like life, abundance of resources, family. Agree that we have no idea what happens when we die except that our spirits are free. Something real simple we can all agree on. I think reincarnation is the perfect way to punish a corrupt human being.

All the problems in the world are completely man made. poverty, murder, lack of freedom it's all self inflicted.

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when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change

Agree that we have no idea what happens when we die except that our spirits are free. Something real simple we can all agree on.

Christians believe in resurrection, which requires no spirit. They were a bit split on the issue, owing to the Greeks believing in duality.

We only believe that we have a spirit, owing to our inability to comprehend how consciousness could work, sans magic ether. Thus we defer the process to another magic level. However, consciousness is probably not what we think it is.

It says "all I believe" which is not a fact.^^This is bad form screw. I guess you missed the part where I said this was my belief, I did not state it as fact like add homonym did. There is not proof in either directions there are clues. I believe that there are more clues that we were created than we were just so lucky.

Y'all bash a lot on religion and I'm right here with you on that. It just seems to me that focusing on the religion has you not focusing on the truth of our existence.

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when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change

It says "all I believe" which is not a fact.^^This is bad form screw. I guess you missed the part where I said this was my belief, I did not state it as fact like add homonym did. There is not proof in either directions there are clues. I believe that there are more clues that we were created than we were just so lucky.

Y'all bash a lot on religion and I'm right here with you on that. It just seems to me that focusing on the religion has you not focusing on the truth of our existence.

I may be reading this wrong, please set me right if I'm wrong, but; I think screwtape said it was "your opinion" he did not say you were qouting a fact. Please double check me, thanks...

It says "all I believe" which is not a fact.^^This is bad form screw. I guess you missed the part where I said this was my belief, I did not state it as fact like add homonym did.

No, jb, I did not miss it. In fact, those are the very first three words of yours I quoted. "All I believe." I left the nested quote so you could see it with your own eyes.

Then I went on to characterize it as "your opinion". The first four words I wrote. "That is your opinion..." Which does not change my point in the least. He said sumpthin, you said sumpthin. Unless we have a way of knowing who said sumpthin right, who cares? You end up with "Uh-huh" "nuh-uh" "uh-huh" "nuh-uh" ugh.

Not all opinions are equal, and some are better than others. The thing of interest we do here is voice opinions and then make a case for why one is better than another. Simply announcing one's opinion is... boring and pointless. And this is not a megaphone just for spouting opinions.

I disagree. I am very interested in truth. I'm fanatical about it. In what way do you think I am not focused on truth, and what do you think truth is?

I believe your hatred for religion clouds your judgement.

Truth is truth.

You will never convince me that this magnificent thing called life is just some random event. That this beautiful planet that has avoided all kinds of dangers for billions of years is still here by chance.

My spirit will soar when it departs these bars of bones!!!! IMO.

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when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change

I disagree. I am very interested in truth. I'm fanatical about it. In what way do you think I am not focused on truth, and what do you think truth is?

Truth is truth.

You will never convince me that this magnificent thing called life is just some random event. That this beautiful planet that has avoided all kinds of dangers for billions of years is still here by chance.

My spirit will soar when it departs these bars of bones!!!! IMO.

Why?

For just one moment try to eliminate all your religious indoctrination. Now look at the world and explain to me where you see a god? Please describe said god.

Why is it absolutely impossible for the universe to have spawned naturally from a big bang and subsequent dust to become us. Our world is full of abundance and is beautiful because of evolution, it seems taylored to our needs because we are taylored to the environment we have at this moment in geological time. When the next ice age happens much of the world will appear to be a shere hell. Only about 15% of earth is habitable, only 10E-1000000000000... of the universe appears to be habitable.

Eliminating the big bangs source could one not conclude that the world was formed by natural processes and we as indicated by scientists formed by evolution.

How would the world be different in the absence of a god.

As for reincarnation being a perfect punishment for transgressions??? How the hell do you conclude that? With out memories of your former life you will randomly either be good or bad over and over till chemistry and lifes lottery allows you to be good.

Maybe in 30 lifetimes I might end up on the right side of Karma, brought up in the right house, correct moral lessons of my parents, correct financial standing, an uncle who did not rape me and all things coming together to make me a good person.

But absent memory we are subject to pure random nature of our lot in life.

You will never convince me that this magnificent thing called life is just some random event. That this beautiful planet that has avoided all kinds of dangers for billions of years is still here by chance.

1) you have just declared that you are not open to alternate ideas ("You will never convince me..."). May I make a humble recommendation: don't declare that you're closed-minded in this crowd? You're opening yourself up to some hardcore ridicule if you do.

2) what kind of understanding of probability do you have? Let me present two examples.

a. Shuffle and deal out a pack of 52 cards face up. The probability of having just dealt that particular order of cards is astronomically small: 1:52! (for those who don't know, that's "52 factorial", or 52 * 51 * 50...*1) But you just did!! But some hand of cards had to be dealt, didn't it?

b. Imagine you're a blade of grass on a fairway. A golf ball that someone drove just landed on YOU!! Out of the hundreds of millions--maybe even billions--of blades of grass on this fairway, YOU got landed on by the ball!! Wow, that's a one in hundreds of millions, or one in billions, chance. But it had to land somewhere, didn't it?

The chances of something having happened, that happened, is 1:1

Stating that you can't believe something because you can't imagine it is the definition of the Argument from Ignorance (logical fallacy)

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My spirit will soar when it departs these bars of bones!!!! IMO.

No it won't!! IMO. *shrug*

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...religion is simply tribalism with a side order of philosophical wankery, and occasionally a baseball bat to smash...anyone who doesn't show...deference to the tribe's chosen totem.

~Astreja

To not believe in god is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place.

No. There are people all around who interpret normal behaviour and ordinary occurrences as if some invisible power had a hand in them. These people lack critical thinking skills and often revel in their own ignorance -> they do not even look for the real reason, they just say, "God did it."

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Nobody says “There are many things that we thought were natural processes, but now know that a god did them.”

I think the largest problem people have finding the Love of God is because they seek it in religions. They expect too much. It's all give me give me give me w/o realizing there are 7.5 billion of us and growing. I feel God's love every day, some days more than others, those are the days I need God most! I feel God's presence the most when I am in my darkest hours, this is an action. People need to accept that these bodies are a temporary vessel and whatever happens to them are not dictated by God. It is dictated by the individual and their surroundings. God keeps our spirits alive not our flesh, IMO.

I just find it fascinating that so many here have drawn such strong conclusions when there is not enough knowledge to do so. Religions are so obviously fake there is no wonder so many of you don't believe in a Loving Creator. Our existence proves there is something extraordinary at work in the universe. Something we are not even close to understanding. I mean we don't even know what 75% of the universe is; we call it dark matter. So until then this mind will stay open to all the possibilities. To me w/o a creator in the equation life has no meaning or purpose. Humans did not create intelligence, it is a gift. One so often that is not used wisely.

In conclusion I will have to say it is not God that fails at Love it is mortals. God is not going to make us Love each other we have to make this decision on our own or it has no worth. The difficulty I find is how to convince those that are selfish to think of others as well as yourself. To think about how your actions involve every living thing on this planet so stop being selfish.

Yet it is that God created selfish gene that causes all the evil we see.

As evolving creatures we cannot help but do evil and thus God has no right t punish any of us as we are exactly what he created. FYPOV that is.

Can you help but do evil? I do not see how. Do you?And if you cannot, why would God punish you?

Christians are always trying to absolve God of moral culpability in the fall by putting forward their free will argument and placing all the blame on mankind.That usually sounds like ----God gave us free will and it was our free willed choices that caused our fall. Hence God is not blameworthy. Such statements simply avoid God's culpability as the author and creator of human nature.

Free will is only the ability to choose. It is not an explanation why anyone would want to choose "A" or "B" (bad or good action). An explanation for why Eve would even have the nature of "being vulnerable to being easily swayed by a serpent" and "desiring to eat a forbidden fruit" must lie in the nature God gave Eve in the first place. Hence God is culpable for deliberately making humans with a nature-inclined-to-fall, and "free will" means nothing as a response to this problem.

If all do evil/sin by nature then, the evil/sin nature is dominant. If not, we would have at least some who would not do evil/sin. Can we then help but do evil? I do not see how. Do you?

Having said the above for the God that I do not believe in, I am a Gnostic Christian naturalist, let me tell you that evil and sin is all human generated and in this sense, I agree with Christians, but for completely different reasons. Evil is mankind’s responsibility and not some imaginary God’s. Free will is something that can only be taken. Free will cannot be given not even by a God unless it has been forcibly withheld.

Much has been written to explain evil and sin but I see as a natural part of evolution.

Consider. First, let us eliminate what some see as evil. Natural disasters. These are unthinking occurrences and are neither good nor evil. There is no intent to do evil even as victims are created. Without intent to do evil, no act should be called evil.In secular courts, this is called mens rea. Latin for an evil mind or intent and without it, the court will not find someone guilty even if they know that they are the perpetrator of the act.

Evil then is only human to human when they know they are doing evil and intend harm.As evolving creatures, all we ever do, and ever can do, is compete or cooperate.Cooperation we would see as good as there are no victims created. Competition would be seen as evil as it creates a victim. We all are either cooperating, doing good, or competing, doing evil, at all times.

Without us doing some of both, we would likely go extinct.

This, to me, explains why there is evil in the world quite well.

Be you a believer in nature, evolution or God, you should see that what Christians see as something to blame, evil, we should see that what we have, competition, deserves a huge thanks for being available to us. Wherever it came from, God or nature, without evolution we would go extinct. We must do good and evil.

There is no conflict between nature and God on this issue. This is how things are and should be. We all must do what some will think is evil as we compete and create losers to this competition.

These links speak to theistic evolution.

If theistic evolution is true, then the myth of Eden should be read as a myth and there is not really any original sin.

If the above is not convincing enough for you then show me where in this baby evil lives or is a part of it’s nature and instincts.

Can you help but do evil? I do not see how. Do you?And if you cannot, why would God punish you?

Of course, the answer to this question entirely depends on how you define "god". Most definitions there have been of god throughout history have been external to the human body (albeit able to store aspects of themself within those bodies).

Looking inside oneself to find god seems like an impossibility. Looking deep inside myself, I will ultimately find.....me. And while I am indeed shockingly incredible, I am not quite so without humility as to regard myself as god - not in any definition of "god" I've ever encountered.

Is knowing thyself not something that is held as a high ideal by most great thinkers?

If you know yourself then you know God as you create him in your image.

The guy in this last link has the right idea of calling God our highest ideals but then falls into idol worship himself.

I do not deny I have biases. Everyone does. It is a result of our poor brains that evolved for many purposes other than making rational conclusions. That is why people developed science and methods of rationality, of which I am a student.

But just because I have biases does not mean I am disinterested in the truth.

You will never convince me that this magnificent thing called life is just some random event.

Is this to lead me to believe you are interested in truth? If so, it did not start off well. People who are interested in believing what is true never say things like "you will never convince me..." That kind of thinking is antithetical to finding wrong beliefs and correcting them. If you want to know the truth, you should be able to be convinced by new information.

Your statement tells me you want your beliefs to be true, which is a whole different ball of wax. It is antithetical to knowing truth.

For the record, I don't think life is random either. Random means a process whereby there are no rules. It means outcomes have no connection to prior conditions. I think the progress of life follows rules. Everything follows rules. Except maybe nuclear decay.

It depends on what you mean by "love". If it is the general understanding, then "Yes"; if it is some weird definition of "love" hemmed about with exceptions and unlikely explanations, then "No."

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Do you believe that God loves us?

Not in the same way that I love my family and dog. Apologists say what God does and then they call that "love".

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God is also said to love us unconditionally. Does God love us unconditionally?

Who says that? I suspect it is deluded "fluffy-bunny, cafeteria Christians, who pick and choose the nice bits in the Bible, and who chant out this sort of garbage in a mindless manner. God does not love us unconditionally! What sort of god would that be?

2 Chronicles 15:13 Whosoever would not seek the LORD God of Israel should be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman.

John 15:6 "If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned."

2 Thessalonians 1:8 "In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ:"

Also, those who work on the Sabbath, even collecting sticks, those women who try to tell men what to do, and a whole host of others are damned eternally. Keep to every one of His 623 commandments and you might, just might, experience some love after you are dead and there are no witnesses about.

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Love and morals developed to enhance interaction and living within groups of people and perhaps other entities. God was alone and did not need to develop morals and could not love anyone because he was alone for untold millennia.

The fault here is that you have no idea what Christianity is saying, do you? God was not alone. He had created the Host of Heaven (inc. the Devil and Jesus) way before he made the Earth and the firmament and the little holes where the rain comes in, and the fountains of the deep and seas and Malaria and polio, and smallpox and cripples, etc.

In conclusion I will have to say it is not God that fails at Love it is mortals.

+1.

God can't fail at love, because he doesn't exist.

That is your opinion and you can not prove it. Life offers too many gifts to say God fails at love. We have an awesome planet, everything we need to survive and all I believe our creator has ever wanted was for us to realize that our actions affect more than just you so use your gift of freewill to chose to be kind to others. Don't be selfish! All the pain and suffering is self inflicted. All of it.

I am not sure I really understand Gnostic Christian's postion on what god is?

Is God a hands on God is all powerful, all knowing, who speaks to people, Smites them, and wants worship, is vane, angry, jealous, and generally riddled with the same flaws as us?

Is God a hands off god who creates a universe and leaves it alone?

I can only give my personal view of the Godhead I believe in.It is real while I do not believe in the other Gods on offer. The thing is that the right way to think of God is to set aside whichever God is found otherwise it becomes idol worship and a useless stagnant God or set of rules to live by.

The final view of God should always be unknown to those who seek.

The Godhead I know was born of man and not some alien creator and sure, it would have all of our flaws. It seems to have them under control better than what we do here. Not too surprising as it cannot lie to itself.

If you do not recognize a spiritual side to your psyche, then God should end up meaning the best rules to live by for you. That is all that you can follow and even if you had a God, that is still all that you can know without an apotheosis.